


Faint heart never won fair maiden

by fox_diaz



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: COC 2020, Carry On Countdown, F/F, Mead, Pimms - Freeform, Renaissance Faires, Swordfighting, fem!SnowBaz, listen it's fem! so beware if you hate fem!, one bag of doritos for main and one for pudding, why does coc always make me laugh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27801349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fox_diaz/pseuds/fox_diaz
Summary: In another universe, Baz and Snow go to a ren faire in England, and sapphic summer romps ensue.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 11
Kudos: 50





	Faint heart never won fair maiden

**Author's Note:**

> Carry On Countdown prompts for day 3 & day 6 (retelling & WLW). Thank you to [Dem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coolcoolcool_nodoubt/pseuds/Coolcoolcool_nodoubt) for beta'ing this!

**SNOW**

Baz is standing next to the petrol pumps, one hand on her hip, sunglasses pushed up on top of her head and an iced coffee in her hand. She’s drinking it through a straw, and when she clocks me coming out of the little petrol station shop with my arms full of snacks she cocks an eyebrow; the combination of _mouth_ and _eyebrows_ is a bit much for ten o’ clock on a Saturday morning.

“It’s only an hour more, and we ate before we left,” she says when I reach her, plucking a massive sharing bag of crisps out of my hand and looking unimpressed. “Why do you need _two_ flavours of Doritos?”

“One’s for pudding,” I say, grinning at her. No amount of bitching about my road trip snacks is going to ruin today for me. It’s actually sunny—sunny enough that we’re probably gonna need the air con soon, and that Baz is absolutely slathered in sunscreen just to sit in the car—and Ags and Pen are crammed into the backseat griping at each other over who gets to pick the music. It’s been so long since we left London that I forgot how _nice_ it feels to see something other than concrete and the corner shop and the off-white walls of my flat.

Baz just rolls her eyes and throws the Doritos back at my head—I just about manage to catch them—before sliding elegantly back into the driver’s seat. I yank open the door with just my little and ring fingers because my hands are too full to do anything else, then practically fall in sideways.

Pen cheers when he sees the snacks, and immediately reaches over the top of my seat to grab a packet off the top of my pile as Baz starts the car and we pull away.

“ _Merlin_ ,” Ags gripes. “Eating tangy cheese flavoured anything in an enclosed space is practically a war crime.” I turn to look at him, wrinkling my nose in his direction. He’s impeccably dressed today—salmon pink shirt tucked into beige chino shorts, blonde hair swept back in a way that looks theoretically effortless but that I happen to know takes him at least twenty minutes in the morning—and he glares openly at Pen when a few Dorito crumbs hit the seat next to him as the packet is ripped open.

“Just because you don’t like something, that doesn’t automatically make it an act of war,” Pen says, pushing his glasses up his nose and offering the Doritos. Ags sighs, but accepts one, handling it gingerly as if it’s going to explode before it reaches his mouth. Pen shakes the bag at him, a little too enthusiastically.

“Don’t just _throw_ them at me, Pen, these are Ralph Lauren and you’re going to ruin my—“

“Chill out! I can just spell them clean! I don’t know why—“

“Boys,” Baz says tersely, lowering her sunglasses and giving them A Look in the rearview mirror. “I will turn this car around.”

I snort with laughter and reach out to put a hand on her thigh. Baz doesn’t like this sort of noise—siblings arguing over each other, the messy love and the bickering, the push and pull of sharing a space and being a little too on top of each other—but I bloody love it. It makes me feel _part_ of something, however stupid that might sound. A family. She gets enough of it at home; I never did. I’m fucking chuffed to be in the middle of this chaos.

“Road trip!” I shout, squeezing Baz’s thigh through her jeans.

“We heard you the first eight hundred times,” Ags says; I hear him grunt, and I can only assume that Pen has elbowed him.

**BAZ**

The renaissance fair is an abomination.

Herstmonceux Castle is impressive enough—it has a moat, and a pretty stone bridge, and neatly-cut parapets at the top of each tower—but the fair is set up in the fields beyond, and it’’s hideously tacky against the backdrop of all that fifteenth-century grandeur. Polyester flags and plastic pentagrams as far as the eye can see.

“You’re not saying it right,” Snow says, poking me in the side with a stubby finger as we make our way over from the car park. Her wings were spelled away on the road to prevent scenes at the services, but Pen unspelled them just before we got out of the car, and she keeps shaking them out happily in a way that makes them look a little too real.

“I have absolutely no idea what you mean,” I say, watching with narrowed eyes as a woman dressed as some sort of bog witch trips on her hem and goes down in an avalanche of tarot cards and biodegradable glitter. Pen rushes over to help her, and Ags rolls his eyes.

"Renaissance _faire_ ,” Snow says insistently. “It’s got an E on the end. That’s what makes it special. Sets it apart from a regular fair.”

“How on _earth_ can you tell if I’m saying it with an E?” I say crossly, but she’s right. I’m not. She can’t make me.

“Just like you can tell I _am_ saying it with an E,” Snow says nonsensically, linking her freckled arm through mine and grinning. “Thanks for driving. Thanks for—you know.”

I _do_ know. I had absolutely no desire to drive two hours down to the south coast to watch people play at sword fighting outside a castle; I spent far too much of my youth watching Snow _actually_ sword fighting, outside the castle we lived in for eight bloody years. She needed this trip, though, was going a little mad inside the flat, and once she saw the promotional pictures for the fair—a woman in full armour sitting astride a horse, with enormous feathered wings and a lance raised—she kept on about it until I relented.

Once we’ve paid the frankly extortionate fee to get in, Pen immediately gets caught up in conversation with an apothecary by the gates, Ags standing at his shoulder expressly so that he can bitch at Pen later about how long he had to wait. Snow is pulling at my hand like a dog trying to break its leash, and in the end I just give up and go with the flow; she pulls me over to a stand selling disgustingly greasy turkey legs and eats one with oil dripping down her chin, then makes me watch pink-faced children try their hand (abysmally) at archery, and then we end up at a stall selling hundreds of swords, axes and other assorted weaponry.

“This is shit,” she says, picking up something impressively ornate and functionally useless. “S’not balanced right. And it’s blunt as hell.”

“That is one of our _decorative_ swords,” says the man behind the counter, bristling in his tunic. “We also stock _real_ weapons, but those are for the serious swordsman.”

“Oi,” says Snow, drawing herself up to her full height (adorable). “Do I not look like a real swordsman? Swords—woman?”

“Well,” says the man, “If you really are interested …”

She’s immediately off in a corner with him, testing out the feel of each sword as he hands them to her; I want to step in and tell her that I’m not prepared to get pulled over and arrested on the A21 back to London for harboring a boot-full of blades, but I stop myself. I know she misses the Sword of Mages like a limb; she still tries to call for it reflexively sometimes, her hand twisting in that familiar pattern by her side, and the little sag in her shoulders when it doesn’t come breaks my heart every time.

She’s talking seriously with the man about technique and grip with their heads bent together, all outrage at his blatant sexism apparently forgotten as soon as he offered to sell her cold, hard steel, and before I can register my concerns she’s sliding her cracked and well-worn debit card across the counter to purchase a mid-range European longsword.

“Fuck,” she says as we leave, her face flushed, staring adoringly down at it like it’s a newborn or a puppy. “Look at it. Sword.”

“Sword,” I say in agreement—she looks so happy that I tug her in by the shoulder and press a kiss to her cheek, which just makes her go even redder.

“He said there’s a solo combat competition over at the tournament—thing,” Snow says. “Can we go? Anybody can enter.”

“Alright,” I say benevolently, just to watch her grin again. “As long as you remember that this is a friendly competition, and that they won’t look kindly on any accidental … beheading.”

She’s the best competitor by miles. Of course she is. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her t-shirt for some reason—better range of motion, I suppose, although the primary advantage for _me_ is that it shows off the lean muscles of her biceps—and pulled her hair up away from her face to prevent distractions. She’s been fighting for almost an hour already, and every time she wins the crowd roars with approval and her smile gets a little bit wider. They keep asking her if she’s okay to go another round, and every time she nods incredulously, as if she’s amazed that they want her at all. At one point somebody asked if she needed to take off her prop wings, and she just grinned dangerously at them like some sort of beautiful, sweaty demon.

Ags and Pen followed the cheering and found me—it seems like _everybody_ did, I think the entire fair has come to watch—so now we’re all leaning against the fence as the announcer shouts through a squealing loudspeaker that this is the final round.

The last man they pit against her is enormous. A man mountain. He’s clearly their big showstopper, their dark knight—his armour has a skull and crossbones on it, for Merlin’s sake.

“Do you think he’ll cry?” Pen says, returning from a side mission and handing me a plastic cup of Pimms.

“Probably,” Ags says, accepting his own cup. “They always do.”

It’s over so quickly it’s almost comical. The gigantic knight is lumbering, too slow, and Snow moves—well, like magic. She gets her points in—tapping him lightly on the ribs, the neck, seeking out all the gaps in his armour—and then, just because she’s a show-off and an idiot and she hasn’t done this for ages, she hooks her foot around his ankle and sends him gently over onto the sand.

The crowd erupts into jubilant cheers, and Pen grabs me by the shoulder and shakes me. “ _That’s our girl!”_ he shouts, and I’m laughing despite myself, watching as a slightly stunned Snow has her hand lifted triumphantly up into the air by the man who’s apparently the king of this fair. He tells her to kneel and she does immediately, swordpoint pressed into the ground, looking for all the world like a chivalrous knight in some French poem. As the ‘king’ places a plastic crown on her head I hear an embarrassing _whooping_ sort of sound coming out of my own mouth, and Ags snorts with laughter next to me.

I can’t help it. She looks so happy—like she’s doing what she was born to do, even if it is just for show in a field ten miles from Eastbourne. She turns around to look for me in the crowd and when we lock eyes, she points at her head, her eyes bright.

“ _Crown_!” she mouths, as if I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

“I know,” I call back. She laughs, screwing up her nose at me. “ _I love you_ ,” I mouth, and she jokingly presses a hand to her heart, and then turns to shake hands with the very tall knight.

We end up staying until the very end of the fair. When it finally gets dark they light lamps all through the grounds, and we weave our way through the glowing stalls and tents, stopping only to listen to snatches of music from a woman playing the lyre and to buy an enormous bottle of mead. Everybody is drifting towards one end of the field and sitting down on picnic blankets and folding chairs, so we follow them, picking our way through until we reach a slight hillock where we can all sit in a line and look over at the castle.

“Oh, _hello_ ,” I say to Snow, when she slings an arm around my shoulder and turns her face into my neck, ever the sloppy drunk.

“Hi,” she says into my collarbone. “Are you a maiden in need of rescuing? Cos I don’t know if you heard, but apparently I’m the best swords _person_ they’ve ever seen.”

“Yes,” I say, tweaking the lopsided crown still wedged down over her curls. “You told me that. Several times, in fact.” She looks up at me with her eyes all soft and crinkled at the edges, and my heart contracts in my chest. “When we get back to London,” I say, finding her hand and interlocking our fingers, “What do you think about joining a fencing club? Somewhere you can do this properly?”

“Is that a thing?” Snow says, looking excited, and I squeeze her hand.

“It’s a thing.”

“Shit,” she says, turning towards the castle as I slide my other arm around her waist. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I want to do that.”

Ags is griping about grass stains on his shorts, which apparently _never_ spell clean, so Pen takes off his jacket and shoves it at him to grumbled thanks and then pours us all some more mead. The crowd somehow goes quiet all at once, a charged hush that seems to come from nowhere, and I go to ask Snow what’s happening but she presses a finger to my lips and raises her eyebrows.

We wait another beat and then the first firework goes off, illuminating the sky above the castle in red and gold, making me jump and Snow laugh. I peel her hand away from my face, grab her by the chin and tilt her mouth towards mine so that I can kiss her, and she’s still laughing when our lips meet, her hand tightening on my shoulder as she draws me in.

“You’re missing it,” Pen says, nudging my leg with his foot, and I give him the finger behind Snow’s back and slip her a little tongue just to annoy him before we break apart.

We watch the rest of the fireworks in a companionable silence, Snow’s head on my shoulder and her sword at our feet, until the last brilliant burst of light sparks out and we’re ready to go home.


End file.
